The Future of Money Project Begins!

In case you hadn’t heard, I’ve been asked to give a keynote address next month at Sibos – “the world’s premier financial services event,” held in Amsterdam. I’m planning to speak about large scale shifts in cultural values and the impact they’re having on our relationship with money, our perceptions about ourselves as humanity, and how we are redefining what ‘true wealth’ means.

The presentation is only 20 minutes long, but I’ve decided to be ambitious and create a 3-5 minute video to accompany the talk. The idea grew out of several conversations I’ve been having with Gabriel Shalom (@gabrielshalom), a video producer out of Berlin that I met via this blog. We’ve been looking for a sweet project to collaborate on, where we can amplify some disruptive memes and get people excited about the emerging trends and opportunities that are surrounding us. “The Future of Money” seemed a worthy project. 🙂

So here’s the deal:

We want to create a compelling overview of what’s going on in the world of currencies, followed by some provocative visions of where things could go. We’re going to be conducting interviews with the movers and shakers out there who are developing new business models, new frameworks, and new ideas about how we can exchange value, innovate, and empower each other. We’re going to ask some tough questions about ethics, morals, and trust. And we’re going to provide some ‘what if’ scenarios of how these things could play out over the next decade.

Help us make it happen!

In the spirit of open innovation we intend to give this video away for free when it is finished. We believe that the research and opinions we’ll collect will be of significant value to anyone concerned about their economic future – and who isn’t these days! That’s why we’re asking you to determine for yourself what degree of support you can muster to help. Even just a small amount will go a long way towards helping us cover our time and expenses on this volunteer effort. And of course it couldn’t hurt to tell your friends 😉

It is our belief that if this production is generously supported by the network it will serve as a perfect example of the kind of courageous new business models that will be increasingly commonplace as the new economy evolves.

I’ll be leaving for Berlin in just a few weeks to begin conducting interviews and putting together the video. I’m really excited to see how this evolves, and we’re open to input for interviewees and scenarios of the future!

Please follow this link to The Future of Money website we’ve created for this initiative, more info about the team, and ways to contribute to the project!

Venessa,
Congratulations – this is excellent news and you definitely picked a discussion worthy topic with multiple sides to it. “Money” is a society-coined term and so the future of money I would think would involve more than just currencies.

I will definitely spread the word around and will also take a look a the site. Also, I will pass on anything I find and source that might be of interest to you.

Not a financial expert, but if you have any brainstorming session let me know.

thanks for helping spread the word. the topic is huge, so i’m still figuring out how to make something digestible yet insightful from a young person who is clearly not an economist, but an idealist with a vision of a more equitable way…

A civilization is made of decisions… this is the ‘social energy’ that makes it all go.

*social energy: individual and collective decisions operating within the limits of available resources and natural law which (quite literally) result in the product you see as a civilization. A decision here is defined as an idea + an action. Decisions can be motivated by any number of factors. Technologies result from previous decisions thus becoming available resources. And decision here is defined broadly… everything from “Let’s build a pyramid for the pharoah!” to “I’ve got a headache I think I’ll lie down.”

All we see that is a civilization can be most fundamentally defined as a product of decisions: ideas + actions.

Political and economic systems are ‘decision technologies’…

However, group decision in scaled social organisms face biological drives that don’t scale directly… especially the boundaries of biological altruism…

The “capital” of a civilization in ultimately the result of an interaction between its decisions and the environment.

Money acts as a store of ‘decision rights’ and allocation mechanism for this ‘social energy’ imperfectly and regrettably with subtly pernicious effect over time… even with the best of intentions. (Bernanke et al aren’t evil… just blindly biased)

The effects of loss of proximity and ‘money’ concentration have distorted decision mechanisms in representative political systems (as is obviously the case in Authoritarian systems).

Technologies are available to counter-balance the monopoly of concentrated money to distort collective decisions.

These ‘decision rights’ CAN be more equitably utilized by facilitating direct peer-to-peer capability for the co-ordination of very small amounts of money.

And this catalyzes additional opportunities for peer-to-peer empowered interaction in the Commons.

(Michel Bauwens, founder of P2P theory is re-posting “On Creating Communities” at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/ … on the 15th of this month I believe… while I prepare a series on the Commons-dedicated Account and how it relates to the vital evolution of peer to peer capabilities for them.)

No discussion of the role or future of money can be complete without attention to this concept of ‘social energy’ (in my opinion) and its relationship to ‘decision rights’…

And no discussion will be complete without meaningfully addressing the subtle but pernicious effects of the ‘boundaries’ of biological altruism as they relate to collective decision mechanisms.

Further the current globalist model predicated on regional specialization is faulty… While global integration is desirable… a model predicated on substantial ‘dispersed resiliency’ is more desirable for global survivability… (again in my opinion.)

P.S. I could use some P.R. Sometimes outsiders DO have something to add to the discussion… and try to make a contribution. Personally I believe the Commons-dedicated Account is a much more valuable ‘financial design’ than a synthetic CDO… but doesn’t seem to attract similar interest from the financial community.

The Commons-dedicated Account is able to act as an intermediary between traditional currencies and the development of peer-to-peer agreements for new mechanisms for credit and/or ’scrip’ creation built around their own resources, energies or determinations of value…

I believe this account is a root structure fundamental for the development of peer-to-peer capabilities which eventually extend beyond the currencies upon which the accounts depend upon for the creation of the network.

This is a pragmatic ‘financial innovation’ addressing a fundamental and necessary capability for peer-to-peer interaction.

P.S. I’m no Pollyanna… I’m a public interest entrepreneur interested in solutions that work… and have developed this concept and system at considerable personal sacrifice. To wait for academia to actually DO something simply takes longer than I have… In that sense Mr. Gagnon has a point… and political parties and the financial services sector both have little interest in rocking the boat. “Change” won’t come from within.)

Great sounding project. Something that might be of interest is a talk given by Tristan Louis a few years ago at the Web2.0 Expo in NYC right as the credit markets melted down. It was a fascinating and timely presentation about the history of currency, and in many ways, gave hints as to where Facebook credits could go.

I wish more people could see through these kinds of pseudo-intellectual projects that take attention – and finances – away from real scientists doing real work to help society. I still haven’t seen anything from this group that isn’t just weed-smoking Timothy Leary reveries.

I’m a big fan of pragmatism myself… and believe the Commons-dedicated Account is well-grounded in that tradition… and is a viable, self-sustaining enterprise with extraordinary collateral capabilities.

The Commons-dedicated Account (and resultant peer-to-peer network) may act as a core-structure for the eventual development of new methods of capital formation by serving as a vital intermediary between traditional finance, banking and currencies… and alternative ‘social energy’ tokens which may be created by self-defined sub-groups of account holders.

The Individually-controlled/Commons-dedicated Account*

*A Self-supporting , Commons-owned neutral network of accounts for both political and charitable monetary contribution… which for fundamental reasons of scale must allow a viable micro-transaction (think x-box points for action in the Commons). The resultant network catalyzes additional functionality for co-ordination of other ‘social energy’ utilization. (If desired, It’s also the most neutral and ultimately politically viable method for the public finance of elections.)

Included in any discussion of the future of money should be consideration of a future without money. Technology makes direct exchange and redistribution of resources without a currency much more viable. Already happening in many quarters.

The key design consideration here is creating an exchange system that is resilient. This mostly means creating one that is radically decentralized and diverse, that by design can not be controlled by a small group of people.

So, I think the future of money should also be though of as the future of monies. It may be that we’re just entering a period of decline for the destabilizing and undemocratic monopoly of central currency. Let’s hope so.

I guess there’s some substance to it already, the media project, if it has to do with Millennials and their relationship to money. They are, in effect, the Future of a lot of things, not least of all, money.

What scares me, though, is the “math” part, and I allude to Dan Robles’ statement above (“Economics without math is called “poetry” in these circles.”) The kind of people you’d have to interview, in my book, you couldn’t get all that close to. And another thing frightens me to no end..

In highschool, we smoked weed and were in every manner “armchair revolutionaries”, with Marxist beards growing, clutching Das Kapital under our arms. We – and by We I mean the Boomerang Generation, or “Tweeners”, a.k.a. “Cuspers”, the Cusp Generation, 1976-1983 – were luckier than our Boomer parents in that regard, i.e. when my father was in school it was a heresy to read Albert Camus’ L’Étranger or to read works by the Existentialist philosophers.

The relationship with money that me and my confrères had, to be honest, was NO RELATIONSHIP WITH MONEY, i.e. we had no money, our parents had no money, and this was true for mostly everyone I knew growing up, i.e. Recession, Inflation, etc.

In the end, almost all of my “colleagues” ended up with no job security, no careers, nothing, just odd jobs, until some got lucky and through persistence more than anything, I guess, they wound up working okay jobs with okay salaries.

None got rich in the days before the dotcom bust, we were too young for that. We just got bad apples from the start, and on top of that, we were a rebellious bunch, did lots of drugs, and ended up with STDs and pregnant girlfriends, things like that.

I guess I have no idea what relationship Millennials or Gen Yers have with money, but I do assume that Gen Yers care about careers and personal brands. I’d call it the Myspace Generation, to be exact, and I think y’all have Utopian dreams of what is essentially Socialism, a.k.a. totalitarian dictatorship.

I promise not to call names so long as you accept that the Future of Money to me is and will always be noninterventionism. Just leave it alone and there won’t be a need for a Conversation on Currencies.

On a personal note, I think a much better topic or subject matter for a media project, as you describe it, for the king of conference where you say you are giving a keynote presentation.. I’d do it on THE FUTURE OF PIRACY, not the Future of Money.

Life is about relationships? I wish I could believe that. I think life is about seeking to fulfil your own self-interests without a care for other people. We are self-centered, and there’s no We without there first being a Me. We seek advantages & advantageous positions, we’ll do things to please others only if we think we might deal with the person again in the future, in which case, a “relationship” is an advantage.. We are opportunists, all.

There are no saints, we are all sinners. It’s every man for himself, i.e. man is a wolf for man. Those who believe otherwise, are deluded. What you propose sounds like Socialism or Communism. We were supposed to have eradicated that problem a long time ago.

Have you lived in the street? had to fight for your life for a cigarette? have you been in jail or suffered cancer, mental illness, extreme poverty? The well-to-do have the luxury to dream of a world of relationships. There’s something to be said about “that solitary individual”. I believe in individualism all the way. Have you lived for many years in complete solitude? isolation? have you experienced losing your entire family and losing all your friends?

There are many who do not have the leisure or luxury to believe that Life is about Relationships. I haven’t met a single person who would befriend another human being for any purpose other than his own self-interest. Laissez-faire capitalism does work, we’ve just never tried it. You might suffer from the Utilitarian Personality Disorder.. it’s okay, there’s medication for that. Or are you an absolutist? Self-interested individuality.. and a free market..

I’d be interested in having some demographic data on people who share your opinion. Probably all Millennials who came from well-to-do families. Probably not many crack-addicted prostitutes believe in such Socialistic ideals. That’s my opinion, I’m used to everyone disagreeing. It doesn’t matter. We are not empathic creatures, we care more about a pimple on our asses than about anything else. I have yet to see a single human being befriend another in the name of cooperation and other “civic virtues”. Unless there’s an advantage or he’s investing in future returns.. or setting the stage for future business deals..

That’s the thing, why should I believe that Venessa’s work is credible and legitimate? What is her past experience in the media? I’ve seen it happen too many times, a pretty girl does a little PR and rises in popularity and she’s suddenly sought after.. But take an old bearded man who is ugly and has bad manners and has great ideas or not so great ideas.. he won’t stand a chance.. there is a bias for young ass. That’s just a matter of fact. But show me some ideas or some work that’s credible in itself.. that has a purpose, that’s well thought-out, and I will back it all the way.. but mere hearsay.. it’s not enough.. & pimping your profile & prostituting yourself to PR for your own advantages and then pretending that Life is about Relationships, that’s called bad faith. Period.

Easy does it brother. These are good people trying to figure a way out of this economic mess. We are all chipping away at the same rock of oppression any way we can. If Venessa can break through even for a moment, we’re going to stick by her. There is a perfectly legitimate place for everyone in the world, including yourself, and we are going to find it for you too. So could you please hold back a little on the assumptions, grab a rope, and start pulling.

I realize that I was overly skeptical, cynical even, and angry. I want to clear something. My anger is not towards any single individual, Venessa or anyone else. I’m upset with an ideology that I see growing in popularity over time, one that threatens my own beliefs. I’m not a miscreant. I’m just a man with ideals. That makes me a bit of a snob, I am realizing. I just hope no one took offense to what I wrote. It wasn’t my goal. My goal was to add to the growing dialogue.

Congrats Venessa! I couldn’t think of a more suitable person to represent us on the “physical” world stage =)

I do not envy you however, as most of what I anticipate you will be saying – the attendees of this conference may not like hearing. Structural shift is obviously what is necessary, but the means to achieve that will not come from the existing “financial industry”. The next financial industry will be about the creating and organizing of value, rather than extracting it. I think Alan Rosenblith put it best: “new currencies will be about making it easy to find the right place to put one’s own efforts based not on extrinsic reward, but on intrinsic value”http://alanrosenblith.blogspot.com/2010/09/currency-design-possibilities.html

Your presentation and video project are exciting! Thank you for opening it up to the community.

I’ve been a silent (and grateful!) observer for several months and finally decided to speak up and share a few (somewhat rambling) thoughts about emerging trends in money and economics. My research and writing has tracked the shift toward integral consciousness, in which we recognize ourselves not as isolated, competing consumption machines but as indivisible parts within an integral living whole. This shift changes the way we perceive our economic interactions, moving us from consumers and employees (= things being employed) to contributors. And it changes our perception about money from a measure of our worth and the goal in itself to one means of making life-enhancing contributions (“voting with our dollars”). Along these lines, environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill calls money “green energy”. And we know that the word currency comes from the same root as the word current, or flow.

So, here’s one corporate example of money becoming a means of contributing to what we find life-enhancing. I was at a workshop the top Corporate Social Responsibility person at Westpac, Australia’s largest bank, with 10 million customers. He talked about how they won’t loan money to environmentally or socially unsustainable projects. I was impressed with what he had to say. Let me know if you’d like to interview him for the video and I’ll see if I can make an introduction.

What your audience (and I!) will be interested in is how the money system will change as a result of the new thinking about money. What structural aspects of our economies have to be changed? What artifacts of the economy will need to be broken down or built new in order to be coherent with the new ways of thinking?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I struggle with the suggestion that money will go away altogether. As a friend said to me recently (on another subject), that seems a little like discovering that your husband has been unfaithful on the living room sofa, so you get rid of the sofa. Certainly we’ll see a shift toward more non-monetary exchange, but isn’t money a useful tool? Isn’t it the way we think about and use it that’s the problem?

Even the logic of local currencies is unclear to me — don’t we want to support integration and flow, even as we also shift our attention to nurturing our own communities? Why does it have to become an exclusionary, disintegrative choice? For example, can we envision a single currency system that supports local economies? Living systems thrive when they have open connections with surrounding systems. Maybe we need local currencies in this transition period to make the point about the importance of building resilient communities, but in the long run, I’m having trouble seeing how local currencies serve our fuller goals.

But I’d love to learn more about structural changes that need to be made to the monetary system in particular. Anyone have good links or resources (besides Venessa’s forthcoming video!) or just opinions you’d send my way?

I’m eager to see how this discussion and project unfold. (End of ramble!)

Vanessa, I’ve sent you a small donation because I think you’ve got hutzpah, asking for money to support a project on the future of money, which suggests we ought to do away with it.

Money’s the scarcest thing on the planet for 99% of people on it & even those people who have lots of money want more. Even those who have lots and give some away only do so for causes they think are worthwhile. People are grateful to them and I’m dusted if I know why.

It doesn’t represent value–someone who takes care of children or an ailing elder–can never be paid enough to signify the value of their work. It does represent power, and cynicism about what’s valuable and what’s not.

Hi Vanessa. Great idea! I fully agree with Neal Gorenflo about the need to highlight ways monetary currencies might be rendered obsolete altogether. Gift economies used to be limited to very small scales where proximity and familiarity assured that freeloaders were known to all involved. Modern communications technologies have given us the ability to scale these gift economies to the point where they are competitive with the market. Couch surfing is a great example of using non-monetary currencies (the ratings hosts and guests give each other) that help build trust in a large network.

First off let me say congratulations and much success in your endeavors.

Money is such a…oh how can i say it, embedded dysfunction for many that we have lost site in many things because of it. but i won’t waste another single second on any negativity that may want to pour out of me surrounding the topics of the past and concentrate on the future.

If there is any generative thoughts that i can give you that would be constructive as well as productive in relation to making this endeavor a wellrounded perspective of people who can contribute value to this i would say a great starting point would be with Service Dominant Logic.

Vargo and Lusch coined the phrase to represent the focus of, “service is the fundamental basis for exchange” in reading many of the pdf’s available here

and following intently both @grahamhill and @wimrampen on this topic I believe this may be a starting point that helps penetrate the wall of finance.

Why i find the topic of Service Dominant Logic very close related to the future of money is because the fundamental teaching in this logic is value in exchange based on service, value in use and a shift from exchanging goods and services towards a mindset of being of service…

Why i think this is important to your initiatives is because this logic shifts our fundamental perspectives on how we view people, money, and value.

Also, since you will be in Amsterdam and Germany, you may be in luck and request to interview both Graham and Wim who i believe can give you the best understanding of how things such as value co-creation, value in use, value exchange, and service dominant logic all center around customers and perhaps at large peoples jobs to be done.

You’ve orchestrated nicely with your story starting with networks, human capital and now into social currency and value exchange, if we are to penetrate this meme into the financial sector, or any big sector we must meet them half way,

and i think half way is what works now, and what tends to help shift perspectives in a way that you can implement it right away and unfold these scenarios of the future…

Service Dominant Logic takes you from a give and take perspective to a give and give perspective, but does it in a business savvy type of logic to unravel real value,

“I’ve seen it happen too many times, a pretty girl does a little PR and rises in popularity and she’s suddenly sought after.. But take an old bearded man who is ugly and has bad manners and has great ideas or not so great ideas.. he won’t stand a chance.. there is a bias for young ass. That’s just a matter of fact. But show me some ideas or some work that’s credible in itself.. that has a purpose, that’s well thought-out, and I will back it all the way.. but mere hearsay.. it’s not enough.. & pimping your profile & prostituting yourself to PR for your own advantages and then pretending that Life is about Relationships, that’s called bad faith. Period.”

I took a moment (actually 2days) to reflect upon your anger, perhaps no one hear has taken the time to truly get to “know you” time is short for that, but it only takes a moment to “understand” and i do understand you. I’ve watched your videos, read some of your stuff, and that’s where i am deriving my understanding.

I think with your statement is one of a “subconscious reaction” that is irrelevant to the discussion on this blog, if you re-read what you said and “read between the lines” you will notice that you need to heal some pretty deep wounds, wounds around money, around unfairness, around “tough life” and see where you can shed them and move on, it’s obvious that you’ve been keen on observing Venessa’s work, but like i don’t know you, i don’t know Venessa or any of the participants, but we all have one understanding, that something is not working, within ourselves and as a society as a whole…

Our dysfuntions are not the problem, the problem is our ability to heal them, the effort to move forward and let go of the pain and suffering that you mention…

I’m the initiator of the Gelre, the first Regional Currency in the Netherlands.
September 29th we are launching our new system: the first currency in the world that will combine both convertibility to Euro AND interest free credit.

We believe this is a major breakthrough towards the ‘future of money’ (an inspiring book!).

You actually make it seem so easy with your presentation but I find this
matter to be actually something that I think I would never understand.
It seems too complicated and very broad for me. I’m looking forward for your next post,
I will try to get the hang of it!

Hey, I think your blog might be having browser compatibility issues.
When I look at your blog in Chrome, it looks fine but when opening
in Internet Explorer, it has some overlapping.
I just wanted to give you a quick heads up! Other then that, superb blog!